Adventures with Harvey

By Cameron Purcell, Columnist

As with most hurricane seasons, my family and I decided to bunker down and wait for the storm to pass. Unfortunately, Harvey was not like most hurricanes.

The power had gone out a few times that day, making me quite upset as I was trying to beat a very difficult video game and Harvey would not let me finish. The third time the power blinked off, I gave up and looked outside to see how bad the rain was. The street was beginning to flood, and my grandmother who was visiting us that day, was freaking out. While my dad assured us that everything was fine and that she was overreacting.

My stepmother did not believe him, and decided to put her trust in a complete stranger who offered to drive her car to higher ground in our neighborhood. Thankfully, he was actually a nice guy and didn’t steal her car. That did not stop everyone in our family from making fun of her for not obeying the universal laws concerning stranger danger.

The flooding in the street was reaching the tires of my father’s and grandmother’s cars. We realized how serious the situation had become and started moving valuables and food upstairs. I’m not sure why we moved the food upstairs since, immediately after hauling everything upstairs, we had to stuff suitcases full of the food and then bring them back downstairs.

The water outside, at this point, had risen to the tailpipe of the cars we still had in the driveway. If we were going to evacuate, we were going to have to go all the way down the street where my stepmother’s car was parked. This meant we would need to wade through waist high water carrying valuables while the hardcore rain got worse and worse.

To keep myself from getting too soaked, I rolled my shorts up as high as they could go. It looked like I was wearing some sort of bulky speedo. After two laborious trips to the car, I had to rescue my cat from our house before we could drive away. The water had risen to our welcome mat, and was nearly high enough to begin flooding our house.I put my cat inside of a dog carrier and threw a towel over it so he wouldn’t get wet from the rain. It was awkward to carry since the handle was covered, and I had to hold the entire thing from the bottom high enough so my cat didn’t get wet.

The final journey to the car was the most troublous. My cat kept crying the entire time because of how frightening the situation must have been for him, so I felt bad. I couldn’t move too fast in the water because then he would get splashed, and then in the middle of me wading my way towards the car, my flip flop flies off. I’m flailing my foot around for a solid two minutes trying to get my flip flop back on before I can slide into the car with my traumatized cat.

“Not all heroes wear flip-flops” Graphic design by Emory Aguilar

We stay the night at a friend of my stepmother’s and return to the house as soon as we can to see the damage the flood had done to our home.

While chairs got thrown under couches somehow and we lost two cars, at least we finally had an excuse to clean out our cluttered garage.